As a fellow WP editor I salute you. However I believe you elide one of the key flaws of WP : Reliable Sources.
As an encyclopedia, WP cannot accept any primary sources, no original research, and only accepts tertiary reference documents. You cannot accept information from blogs, podcasts, or autobiographies, press releases, substack etc. Information must be sourced to reference material, which in the case of living biographies is almost exclusively published journalism.
At issue: there’s simply no mechanism to protect an individual from an attack from the press because the fundamental presumption is that the press will be balanced, ie if a liberal publication says x then a conservative publication should say y and if it doesn’t then x must be true.
A recent case I tried to make (poorly, I guess) was in regard to a princess of Norway and her fiancé. The WP article was originally created by the person in question (or an agent) and focused on basic stuff like, “he owned a company,” or, “he wrote a book.” Basically he was using WP for advertising. W/E—no one cares about 150 words linking to some NYT book reviews. All good.
However, a few years later, once this person gets hitched to royalty, every Norwegian tabloid and person with an axe to grind begins reporting on his juvenile delinquency, weird shamanic beliefs and bizarre Covid beliefs. The quotes come from people (in one case a journalist who got a bad vibe in a phone call) and absolutely no quotes from the accused. All printed sources were accepted and the article is now a giant singular hit-piece with one or two very determined editors ensuring every new admonition is documented.
Since there’s no reporting in the other direction there’s no ability to add context or refute any of the claims. This lack of balance bakes the truth into the article. This happens often and is the source of a fair bit of information laundering, wherein a journal reports someone saying something, WP sites it and it is re-reported as a fact.
Additionally there are absolutely problems with admins running their own information fiefdoms (see @tracingwoodgrains), political bias in reliable sources and bias due to the preponderance of editors being academics, a field that skews hard to the left. The site is also hemorrhaging editors due to its crappy culture and the nature of its antagonistic approach; working on WP is thankless and brutal.
WP is unable to update with technology, preventing new and possibly better sources of information.
It’s laborious and Byzantine. Lastly, it is obsessed with controversy making things that are hardly news into entire branches of knowledge.
I think you’re correct that people don’t understand how WP works—though this hardly a conservative issue. The problem is pretending there isn’t a problem with WP. The issues may even be endemic to the entire project.
Consider Larry Sanger, a founder and leading critic of the site.
“Another hurdle was to figure out how to rein in the bad actors so that they did not ruin the project for everyone else. Unfortunately, we never did come up with a good solution for that one,” Sanger added.
“Wikipedia is a broken system as a result,” he said.
What infuriates me the most is that I deeply believe in the value of WP and consider it one of the most important human historical documents ever conceived. Along with the Way-back Machine, it is the definitive repository of all human knowledge coupled with its own complete history and available in most of the world’s languages. It is a contender for Wonder of the World. But it fails in fundamental ways and pretending it doesn’t have very serious issues or that it’s just angry outsiders who don’t understand is wrong.
I applaud your effort, and I applaud you for still editing. I applaud your aim to seek impartiality. I applaud your hope to educate the masses. I think, however, the issues go far deeper than you described and assuming people simply don’t understand the platform is a tired argument that allows motivated thinkers to dismiss the claims out of hand.
This is a great argument and I largely agree. Thank you for reading and leaving such a thoughtful well argued response. I can’t fully respond right now on the level your response deserves - I want to think on it - but I wanted to respond right away to let you know how much I appreciate this and that I’ll respond later on a deeper level
Finally responding with the longer response I said I've give.
Right away, I agree that this is a major problem: "WP cannot accept any primary sources, no original research, and only accepts tertiary reference documents. You cannot accept information from blogs, podcasts, or autobiographies, press releases, substack etc. Information must be sourced to reference material, which in the case of living biographies is almost exclusively published journalism."
Wikipedia's rules for reliable sources have become increasingly dated IMO. But I don't know what the answer is. If the rules are relaxed, it will probably require more scrutiny from editors and possibly a heavier hand from administrators and even paid employees.
It's also clear that different Wikipedia editors interpret Wikipedia's standards in wildly different ways. You can get in an edit war over something that you will ultimately lose simply because you don't have the attention, effort, or time to dedicate to winning the war.
To your last point: " the issues go far deeper than you described and assuming people simply don’t understand the platform is a tired argument that allows motivated thinkers to dismiss the claims out of hand."
I totally agree here as well. One thing I've considered is the possibility of Wikipedia adding disclaimer tags to the top of literally every page that educates them on how Wikipedia works, how to edit, what a source is, what notability is, etc. My goal with this Substack is to continue to cover all the angles of Wikipedia with the aim of at least making it better understood. And maybe, I hope, effecting some level of change, whether that's realistic or not.
Ah. I did not include everything he has said about Wikipedia in here. He has said a lot about bias in the editing process that I think he would not say if he understood it better. I have thought about writing something that goes deeper and may have to. Looking back on this, it seems I skimmed some aspects of Musk’s history of comments
I've not looked into it in depth, but I'd be surprised if Wikipedia's editor base was demographically or politically representative of, say, the US. Clearly it won't be representative of the world! It's hard to believe that doesn't have an impact on the editing. You can try to be neutral of course, but even the collective choices which determine which articles are written and edited are biased.
It skews white, male and American, at least within the English language version. But yeah there are some systemic biases, but I do not see a political bias inside of it - at least not on the level that Musk and others claim.
This is a good look from Wikipedia editors about Wikipedia's own systemic bias issues. I do think it's ironic that the same people who have waged war with critical race theory (itself based on the idea of system bias) are now turning to Wikipedia, when the common through line is system bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias
He’s made a few thousand edits to George’s Wikipedia page in the past, and people believe he was targeting anti-war activists. He was erratically posting on Christmas Day and during late hours in 2018. People were convinced he was a spook and On 30 October 2022, his account was suspended for "disruptive editing by repeatedly trying to game or push the limits of TBANs".
I appreciate the article, and just wanted to add that Elon Musk was not able to buy Wikipedia because it is largely funded by an infinitesimal fraction of the people who use it, aka us. If you can afford it you should definitely make a donation.
This seems to me a scary question: What happens if and when someone (like Musk, or just someone who wants to be like Musk, or anyone really) takes it in their head to create an army of registered Wikipedia editor AI bot accounts?
I've worried about similar such things. I think it would look a lot like what's happening on reddit, where bots go wild and are moderated into irrelevance or banned by moderators in some subreddits while taking over in other subreddits.
I think (or maybe just hope) Wikipedia is a little harder to game with bots than a lot of other platforms because there are no likes or upvotes or downvotes. Even if the bots had registered editor accounts, they would still need to be logged and trained in editing AND trained in pushing a specific narrative. Not saying it's impossible, or even unlikely, and probably a situation that needs to be anticipated on some level. It could lead to a lot of articles moving into semi-protected or even fully protected status.
Hi- this is interesting - and thank you for editing, it seems an exhausting task .
In terms of this controversy - I don’t know how the one action can be separated from his actions directly after, and those done before - and the actions of the group he is a member of. It is only in isolation from this other knowledge that it is controversial.
The MAGA movement incorporated the American neo-Nazi factions…. In addition to others ( evangelicals , KKK, libertarians)
His mother/mother’s family had ties to Nazis and he grew up In her care.
Musk later visited with the far right party in Germany in the immediate aftermath. JD Vance after visiting Dachau also visited with the AfL.
Musk made several antisemitic “jokes” that were just disgusting a la comments fitting of Nazis or neonazis - quite enamored with his own pathetic humor.
Any way - maybe u discussed that all - but I think if we just look at the gesture absent knowledge of anything else - it’s controversial . Say we look at the “straightarm gesture” of Dr Strangelove - we might call it “controversial “ - is it? It’s not , right? Only Because it’s a movie and he’s not a real pol figure.
thanks for reading and commenting! Since I first wrote this, the title of the article evolved to "Elon Musk salute controversy", after a lot of discussion and debate in the Talk page. There is currently a new debate to change it to "Elon Musk Nazi salute controversy", which I don't think will happen.
A lot of the other things you referenced have been incorporated into this article (the jokes and the AfL especially) but there's a tricky element to something like this, where you don't want an article to become so broad that it's no longer clear what it's subject is. Plus there are so many editors actively involved in this situation, many with differing views. There are also many edits still happening from anonymous IP addresses, so I think it's only a matter of time before the page becomes semi-protected.
Thank you for this! — About 12-15 years ago, I spent a great deal of time editing Wikipedia pages regarding White Rose resistance. Almost everything at the time was based on Inge Scholl’s mostly-fictional narrative that has her siblings as The White Rose. She wrote her book and got Marshall and McCloy funds to spread that mostly-fictional narrative and reinvent her own Nazi era story. She was hardcore Nazi during the war.
The edits held for a few years. I checked again recently and it’s gone back to the legendary telling. About 80% is simply false.
Is there a way to flag what’s blatantly false, so it’s rejected when others try to change it back?
Good question! There are a couple things you could do: use the Talk page. It’s very rare for anything to get deleted from a Talk page so that would be good for posterity. You could also add a tag to the top of the page.
just post a penis picture and be done with it. No words needed. Oh, and make sure it’s botched penis job picture to keep it as true to form as possible.
As a fellow WP editor I salute you. However I believe you elide one of the key flaws of WP : Reliable Sources.
As an encyclopedia, WP cannot accept any primary sources, no original research, and only accepts tertiary reference documents. You cannot accept information from blogs, podcasts, or autobiographies, press releases, substack etc. Information must be sourced to reference material, which in the case of living biographies is almost exclusively published journalism.
At issue: there’s simply no mechanism to protect an individual from an attack from the press because the fundamental presumption is that the press will be balanced, ie if a liberal publication says x then a conservative publication should say y and if it doesn’t then x must be true.
A recent case I tried to make (poorly, I guess) was in regard to a princess of Norway and her fiancé. The WP article was originally created by the person in question (or an agent) and focused on basic stuff like, “he owned a company,” or, “he wrote a book.” Basically he was using WP for advertising. W/E—no one cares about 150 words linking to some NYT book reviews. All good.
However, a few years later, once this person gets hitched to royalty, every Norwegian tabloid and person with an axe to grind begins reporting on his juvenile delinquency, weird shamanic beliefs and bizarre Covid beliefs. The quotes come from people (in one case a journalist who got a bad vibe in a phone call) and absolutely no quotes from the accused. All printed sources were accepted and the article is now a giant singular hit-piece with one or two very determined editors ensuring every new admonition is documented.
Since there’s no reporting in the other direction there’s no ability to add context or refute any of the claims. This lack of balance bakes the truth into the article. This happens often and is the source of a fair bit of information laundering, wherein a journal reports someone saying something, WP sites it and it is re-reported as a fact.
Additionally there are absolutely problems with admins running their own information fiefdoms (see @tracingwoodgrains), political bias in reliable sources and bias due to the preponderance of editors being academics, a field that skews hard to the left. The site is also hemorrhaging editors due to its crappy culture and the nature of its antagonistic approach; working on WP is thankless and brutal.
WP is unable to update with technology, preventing new and possibly better sources of information.
It’s laborious and Byzantine. Lastly, it is obsessed with controversy making things that are hardly news into entire branches of knowledge.
I think you’re correct that people don’t understand how WP works—though this hardly a conservative issue. The problem is pretending there isn’t a problem with WP. The issues may even be endemic to the entire project.
Consider Larry Sanger, a founder and leading critic of the site.
“Another hurdle was to figure out how to rein in the bad actors so that they did not ruin the project for everyone else. Unfortunately, we never did come up with a good solution for that one,” Sanger added.
“Wikipedia is a broken system as a result,” he said.
What infuriates me the most is that I deeply believe in the value of WP and consider it one of the most important human historical documents ever conceived. Along with the Way-back Machine, it is the definitive repository of all human knowledge coupled with its own complete history and available in most of the world’s languages. It is a contender for Wonder of the World. But it fails in fundamental ways and pretending it doesn’t have very serious issues or that it’s just angry outsiders who don’t understand is wrong.
I applaud your effort, and I applaud you for still editing. I applaud your aim to seek impartiality. I applaud your hope to educate the masses. I think, however, the issues go far deeper than you described and assuming people simply don’t understand the platform is a tired argument that allows motivated thinkers to dismiss the claims out of hand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
This is a great argument and I largely agree. Thank you for reading and leaving such a thoughtful well argued response. I can’t fully respond right now on the level your response deserves - I want to think on it - but I wanted to respond right away to let you know how much I appreciate this and that I’ll respond later on a deeper level
I appreciate that. What I think we all want is a Wikipedia that works as well as it can.
You might appreciate some of the other stuff I’ve written on the topic of Wikipedia. I just joined Substack 6 weeks ago and so far I only have written about it. Here’s my latest: https://open.substack.com/pub/edithistory/p/was-wikipedia-manipulated-as-part?r=1edamf&utm_medium=ios
Finally responding with the longer response I said I've give.
Right away, I agree that this is a major problem: "WP cannot accept any primary sources, no original research, and only accepts tertiary reference documents. You cannot accept information from blogs, podcasts, or autobiographies, press releases, substack etc. Information must be sourced to reference material, which in the case of living biographies is almost exclusively published journalism."
Wikipedia's rules for reliable sources have become increasingly dated IMO. But I don't know what the answer is. If the rules are relaxed, it will probably require more scrutiny from editors and possibly a heavier hand from administrators and even paid employees.
It's also clear that different Wikipedia editors interpret Wikipedia's standards in wildly different ways. You can get in an edit war over something that you will ultimately lose simply because you don't have the attention, effort, or time to dedicate to winning the war.
To your last point: " the issues go far deeper than you described and assuming people simply don’t understand the platform is a tired argument that allows motivated thinkers to dismiss the claims out of hand."
I totally agree here as well. One thing I've considered is the possibility of Wikipedia adding disclaimer tags to the top of literally every page that educates them on how Wikipedia works, how to edit, what a source is, what notability is, etc. My goal with this Substack is to continue to cover all the angles of Wikipedia with the aim of at least making it better understood. And maybe, I hope, effecting some level of change, whether that's realistic or not.
Musk seems rather prickly when it comes to criticism, but I'm not clear what he hasn't understood about Wikipedia's editing process.
Also - thank you for commenting!
Ah. I did not include everything he has said about Wikipedia in here. He has said a lot about bias in the editing process that I think he would not say if he understood it better. I have thought about writing something that goes deeper and may have to. Looking back on this, it seems I skimmed some aspects of Musk’s history of comments
I've not looked into it in depth, but I'd be surprised if Wikipedia's editor base was demographically or politically representative of, say, the US. Clearly it won't be representative of the world! It's hard to believe that doesn't have an impact on the editing. You can try to be neutral of course, but even the collective choices which determine which articles are written and edited are biased.
Still one of my most visited websites though!
It skews white, male and American, at least within the English language version. But yeah there are some systemic biases, but I do not see a political bias inside of it - at least not on the level that Musk and others claim.
White male - higher education
This is a good look from Wikipedia editors about Wikipedia's own systemic bias issues. I do think it's ironic that the same people who have waged war with critical race theory (itself based on the idea of system bias) are now turning to Wikipedia, when the common through line is system bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias
Just thanks for your work. I regularly use and donate to Wikipedia. I consider it a vital service.
(Also I regularly perform ‘In The Pines’.)
That’s a great song!
Interesting article. Have you heard of former MP George Galloway’s notorious Wikipedia editor stalker ‘Philip Cross’? https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44495696.amp
He’s made a few thousand edits to George’s Wikipedia page in the past, and people believe he was targeting anti-war activists. He was erratically posting on Christmas Day and during late hours in 2018. People were convinced he was a spook and On 30 October 2022, his account was suspended for "disruptive editing by repeatedly trying to game or push the limits of TBANs".
I need to check this one out. I had not heard about it!
Post this on Wikipedia! Or should I do it?
I don’t know where I would post it on there but thanks!
Thank you for your editing work! Wikipedia editors are unsung heroes. I wish it were better understood. And yes, I donate although not very much.
Thank you for reading and commenting!
I see you are on the Star Trek Into Darkness side. lol great read and v informative thank you for this!! I <3 Wikipedia
Thank you! Are you Team Into or team into?
I appreciate the article, and just wanted to add that Elon Musk was not able to buy Wikipedia because it is largely funded by an infinitesimal fraction of the people who use it, aka us. If you can afford it you should definitely make a donation.
I should’ve mentioned that! Wales has said a few times that Musk hates Wikipedia because he will never be able to buy it. Thanks for the comment
This seems to me a scary question: What happens if and when someone (like Musk, or just someone who wants to be like Musk, or anyone really) takes it in their head to create an army of registered Wikipedia editor AI bot accounts?
I've worried about similar such things. I think it would look a lot like what's happening on reddit, where bots go wild and are moderated into irrelevance or banned by moderators in some subreddits while taking over in other subreddits.
I think (or maybe just hope) Wikipedia is a little harder to game with bots than a lot of other platforms because there are no likes or upvotes or downvotes. Even if the bots had registered editor accounts, they would still need to be logged and trained in editing AND trained in pushing a specific narrative. Not saying it's impossible, or even unlikely, and probably a situation that needs to be anticipated on some level. It could lead to a lot of articles moving into semi-protected or even fully protected status.
Hi- this is interesting - and thank you for editing, it seems an exhausting task .
In terms of this controversy - I don’t know how the one action can be separated from his actions directly after, and those done before - and the actions of the group he is a member of. It is only in isolation from this other knowledge that it is controversial.
The MAGA movement incorporated the American neo-Nazi factions…. In addition to others ( evangelicals , KKK, libertarians)
His mother/mother’s family had ties to Nazis and he grew up In her care.
Musk later visited with the far right party in Germany in the immediate aftermath. JD Vance after visiting Dachau also visited with the AfL.
Musk made several antisemitic “jokes” that were just disgusting a la comments fitting of Nazis or neonazis - quite enamored with his own pathetic humor.
Any way - maybe u discussed that all - but I think if we just look at the gesture absent knowledge of anything else - it’s controversial . Say we look at the “straightarm gesture” of Dr Strangelove - we might call it “controversial “ - is it? It’s not , right? Only Because it’s a movie and he’s not a real pol figure.
thanks for reading and commenting! Since I first wrote this, the title of the article evolved to "Elon Musk salute controversy", after a lot of discussion and debate in the Talk page. There is currently a new debate to change it to "Elon Musk Nazi salute controversy", which I don't think will happen.
A lot of the other things you referenced have been incorporated into this article (the jokes and the AfL especially) but there's a tricky element to something like this, where you don't want an article to become so broad that it's no longer clear what it's subject is. Plus there are so many editors actively involved in this situation, many with differing views. There are also many edits still happening from anonymous IP addresses, so I think it's only a matter of time before the page becomes semi-protected.
Thank you for this! — About 12-15 years ago, I spent a great deal of time editing Wikipedia pages regarding White Rose resistance. Almost everything at the time was based on Inge Scholl’s mostly-fictional narrative that has her siblings as The White Rose. She wrote her book and got Marshall and McCloy funds to spread that mostly-fictional narrative and reinvent her own Nazi era story. She was hardcore Nazi during the war.
The edits held for a few years. I checked again recently and it’s gone back to the legendary telling. About 80% is simply false.
Is there a way to flag what’s blatantly false, so it’s rejected when others try to change it back?
Good question! There are a couple things you could do: use the Talk page. It’s very rare for anything to get deleted from a Talk page so that would be good for posterity. You could also add a tag to the top of the page.
Thanks. I will see if I can make permanent progress this time.
I think I’ll take a look too!
just post a penis picture and be done with it. No words needed. Oh, and make sure it’s botched penis job picture to keep it as true to form as possible.
I appreciate the comment but I don’t think I’m gonna do that.